Tag: short stories

The secretaries who worked in his father’s outer office didn’t even say hello to Casey. That was because two of them weren’t really a secretaries at all but just students at the university. They kept typing on their typewriters and listening to their Dictaphones. And Mrs. Tish, the real secretary for the outer office, didn’t say “hello” either because she was talking on the telephone back at her desk.

Well, it didn’t matter. Casey walked right past the secretaries’ desks into the second office.

“Hello, young man.” said Mrs. Paskow, who was his father’s personal secretary. She had a drawer of one of the file cabinets open.

“Is he here?” said Casey.

But he had already gone over to the door and looked in. What he saw was his father’s big desk and his father’s big chair pushed back from the desk and the painting of rounded hills of corn fields and rounded trees up on the wall behind his father’s chair.Continue reading

Sheila Canterwell, beloved kindergarten teacher, used to take the ribbon with her Haunted Haus, and before that Reverend Jim McGee smugly won decades worth of praise with his carefully planned Zombie Garden. He spent hours in his garage hand painting fake rubber limbs to look terrifyingly real when strewn in haphazard rows. We all enjoyed the results of their friendly feud, ohhing and ahhhing at each new height they managed to reach.

The prizes have varied over time, from gift certificates, to lawn service, to cash on occasion, but really, it’s the awe and appreciation of the neighborhood that most seek to win. And growing ghosts? Well, that’ll do it.

Thing is, no one in the neighborhood ever managed to grow a decent ghost. Some tried, including Jim and Sheila, but the soil didn’t cooperate, or the corpse seed didn’t take even if it was planted at the height of spring, under a full moon. We once saw them collaborate a bit, trying to get a few to come up in the community garden in town. Nothing doing, it just didn’t happen.Continue reading